Shelf Drilling has implemented Riverbed SaaS Accelerator by Riverbed | Aternity to accelerate business-critical SaaS applications and Riverbed SteelHead for WAN Optimisation to maximise network and application performance.

The Dubai-headquartered company operates 30 rigs across eight countries and has 12 onshore locations, with approximately 3,000 employees and contractors. While technology plays a fundamental role in operations, the company’s offshore rigs present unique IT challenges.

"As satellite links are the primary means of connectivity, these rigs typically have low bandwidth of just 1-2 Mbps, and high latency of up to 750 milliseconds," explains Ian Clydesdale, IT Director at Shelf Drilling.

"As a result, some of our key applications require optimisation to manage data replication effectively, including our JD Edwards ERP platform, responsible for generating purchase orders in the procurement process, as well as our operational management applications."

Clydesdale adds: "Additionally, all the usual administrative functions need to share and access large files especially during key rig operations. Also, employee satisfaction is another aspect that’s heavily dependent on connectivity. Our staff now rely on bandwidth-intensive applications to keep in touch with family and carry out personal functions such as mobile banking. It’s imperative for us to facilitate this."

With Riverbed | Aternity solutions, Shelf Drilling has overcome the inherent bandwidth limitations of the VSAT links used to connect its off-shore rigs to mission-critical on-premises and cloud-based applications.

By delivering a 95 per cent reduction to the company’s Intranet traffic while optimising core applications by 80 per cent, the solution has helped Shelf Drilling streamline critical rig operations including order processing, staff training, and operations management.

These solutions integrate with key technologies such as Shelf Drilling’s VMware virtualisation software, JD Edwards, and Microsoft 365 to improve performance.

Riverbed | Aternity has enabled the company to achieve a compression rate of over 50 per cent on 1.2 terabytes of email data.

Performance monitoring traffic is also accelerated at an average rate of 67 per cent per month, and for their ERP suite, the company experiences 81 per cent optimisation along with a 95 per cent reduction in database replication traffic.

Additionally, Riverbed | Aternity streamlines replication of data from offshore instances to the virtual cloud environment.

Since Riverbed | Aternity began optimising Shelf Drilling's Internet traffic, outages are now less likely to affect data transfer. This is key to the company’s cloud-first strategy which includes the migration to Microsoft Azure in the UAE.

"Riverbed | Aternity is an integral part of our infrastructure, so when we’re considering new technology solutions, we have to prioritise technologies that integrate directly with it," says Clydesdale.

"We’re always striving for the best possible digital experience for our teams, and it simply doesn’t make sense to run a network of our sise and complexity without Riverbed | Aternity’s optimisation and SaaS Acceleration solutions."